Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The Gandhi magic

Electoral politics in India is a murky and complex business which taxes even the interest of many Indians.

Rahul Gandhi

While the two top dogs of Indian politics the Congress and the BJP – bark at each other from behind the gates of their marbled but crumbling electoral palaces, the Indian political street is filling up with countless stray local parties who, one these days, are threatening to club together and take control.

As a result, since the General Election of 2004 I've hardly written a word about Indian politics for my English readers back home. It's just too obscure.

However Wednesday's Times of India runs an intriguing front-page story that instantly renews my appetite for the electoral fray.

Apparently Rahul Gandhi dimple-cheeked son of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the late prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi – is going to take on the Herculean labour of reviving Congress fortunes in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.

Why will this be so fascinating? Because, if it happens, we shall get a real sense of who Rahul Gandhi is and whether the Gandhi dynastic magic – which some analysts say carried Sonia Gandhi to power in 2004 can still move the voters.

Since being elected in 2004 as an MP, Rahul has hardly set the place on fire. He made one slightly bizarre trip to Kabul (where despite all his best efforts he up-staged the Indian Prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh) and has attracted a few inches in the gossip columns about whether he will follow his father and marry a foreigner – his long-term girlfriend is Colombian or Spanish depending the day of the week.

What's interesting is that if this is true (and I still have my doubts whether it will really happen) Rahul will have gone from taking political baby-steps to making a giant leap for Congress.

For much of the post-Independence era Congress ruled Uttar Pradesh – but in recent years the Cong vote has been decimated by the emergence of two powerful local parties, Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party (SP) and Mayawati's Dalit-based BSP as well as the rise of the Hindu-nationalist BJP in the Hindi heartlands.

So, can Rahul pull it off? I've no idea but if he can, he'll be on a fast-track to the top job which the ever-sycophantic Congress faithful already have him marked down for.

However the decision to let Rahul have a crack at UP leaves him dangerously exposed – hence my suspicion that it might not happen.

Rahul has shown precious little charisma on the hustings – unlike his sister Priyanka who appears to be out of politics while she brings up her children – and has yet to display much in the way of penetrating intellect.

There is real potential that Rahul might be humiliated by the exercise, blowing away much of the political capital that he has built up by staying quiet. It's going to be gripping stuff…

A quick PSÂ… Picture the scene. I'm sitting in the office of the Collector's of Shivpuri, a town in Madhya Pradesh. The collector, you should know, is an all-powerful figure who is the chief bureaucrat of a district, who sits at a raised dais to which supplicants approach for rulings of one kind or another. Suffice to say these men take themselves pretty seriously.

So there we were, chatting away, when suddenly, there was a POP! FIZZ! BANG! and out went the all lights. The office was suddenly illuminated by a sheet of orange flame that shot up from a board of sockets mounted on the wall behind the Collector's chair.

As the room filled with smoke and we evacuated leaving several underlings to tackle the small fire, I couldn't help feeling cheered that even a man as powerful as the Collector isn't immune to the vagaries of Indian electrics. Democracy in action.